


Afterlife Lawyer

by cthulhuraejepsen



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 05:35:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16804633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/cthulhuraejepsen
Summary: Written for /r/WritingPrompts, "[WP] The rules of who goes to heaven and hell are clear, definite, and inarguable. You are an afterlife lawyer, who helps people figure out if their potentially sinful plans are technically allowed by the rules." Could probably have been a better short story with more work, posted here for posterity.





	Afterlife Lawyer

It was my personal opinion that the entire concept of hell was utterly immoral, which was exactly why I'd become a lawyer in the first place. Where a doctor or fighter might save someone's life, my calling was higher: I wanted to save them from an eternity of torture, one which no one thinking being could possibly deserve.

When I told people what I did, they often got a cross look on their face, because they assumed the worst. The legal code used by heaven and hell were so arcane that it took six years of law school to really understand them. For everyone else, there were simple (though technically inaccurate) commandments, which were close enough to the truth for most purposes. Anyone hearing that I was an afterlife lawyer would assume that I worked for the worst of the worst, offering advise that would save the immortal souls of psychopaths, crime lords, and politicians.

That really wasn't the case. Like a lot of afterlife lawyers, I thought studying and explaining the law was a moral imperative; the high-powered guys on retainer for the truly despicable were a rarity. Me? I mostly took the corner cases, and for my fee, offered advice to people who were honestly concerned about where they would end up.

"Thank you for coming in," I said to the prospective client, Mr. Shoemaker. "How we usually do this is that I'll listen to the initial issue, then make a quick determination about whether or not I can help you. From there, we go to full payment, which my secretary should already have gone over. Does that sound good to you?"

"Yes," nodded Mr. Shoemaker. "And I'm hoping that you can help, because it's a real humdinger."

"Go ahead," I replied. He was an older man, a little uncertain of himself, and I thought I knew how this was going to go. Some people just wanted to unload, to treat me like a therapist or get some assurance that they were good people, and I'd had him pegged as that the moment he'd walked in. People like that paid the bills, but they weren't why I'd gotten into the profession. Still, I would listen with an open mind.

"I've killed a lot of people," he said.

"Oh," I said. "In what context?" Military, I was hoping.

"I've worked in a nursing home the last fifty years," he said. "I was a little boy when the True Rules got handed down, and I thought, well, something had to be done."

"I ... see," I said. "Before we go further, I'm required to inform you that I'm a mandatory reporter, and while discussions here are covered by a form of attorney-client privilege, it does not cover past crimes."

"I can still talk, can't I?" asked Mr. Shoemaker. "I can still ask advice?"

"If you've killed people, I have to report you to the police," I said. I had a gun in my desk, but the drawer was locked, and I didn't keep the gun loaded. I was concerned for my own safety, but I'd had people get irate before, and the best approach I'd found was to be clear and calm.

"But you can do that after we've talked?" asked Mr. Shoemaker. "I'll pay for your time. I just need someone to give me some advice."

"I can't risk my own soul in giving you advice that might lead you to murder another person," I said.

"No, nothing like that," said Mr. Shoemaker. "Would you though?" he asked. "Maybe not for me, but would you go to hell if you could send two people to heaven?"

I had thought about that a lot, as you might expect for someone in my profession and with my particular beliefs. "No," I said. "You might call me selfish, but no."

"Well, I thought that it was obvious," he said. "I thought saving two people at the cost of myself was what any right-thinking person ought to do. So I got the job at the nursing home, and I started putting them down, only the good ones."

"Most people like you go at the other end," I said. "They go after babies." I tried to keep the coldness from my voice.

"Always seemed cruel to me," he said. "Someone goes through the effort to bring a baby into this world, someone loves it, and you take that away from them?" He shook his head. "No, for me it was my grandmother. She was a darling woman, salt of the earth, but toward the end, there were changes." He tapped the side of his head. "Happens, as the mind starts to go. Sometimes they get violent or angry, even if they were sweethearts the rest of their life. It's enough to damn them, in some cases, even if they weren't really themselves. That's true, isn't it?"

"It is," I said. The American legal code had *mens rea*, but the rules of the afterlife weren't so sensible on the matter of mental state. It was one of the reasons I was a teetotaler. "And so you kill them?" I asked.

"Sure," said Mr. Shoemaker. "I never took pleasure from it, if that's what you're thinking, it was always just a thing that had to be done. Only the good ones, the ones that I thought would get to heaven, the ones at risk in their twilight years."

"I see," I said. I felt a bit of empathy for his position, but I had never been in that camp. "But you know that what you did was criminal, and that you'll almost certainly be going to hell unless there are some mitigating factors you're not sharing with me." It was pretty obvious that he didn't qualify for the Nuremberg loophole, or any of the others. You didn't get out of hell by doing what you thought was best, you got out by following the rules.

"Well, it's about one of the people at the home," said Mr. Shoemaker. "That's who I came to ask about. She's an old woman, and the first signs of dementia have set in. She's who I want to ask about."

"I try my best not to consult about people who aren't party to the consultation," I said. Sometimes it was unavoidable. "But since you've come here, and confessed to me ... I suppose." I wasn't a violation of the True Rules, but it was against my personal code.

"She was talking to me about her sins," he said. We tended to use the term 'violations' in the business, but I let it pass. "She was a nurse, during the war, and saw her fair share of violence. She was always helping people to heal though, soldiers coming in off the front lines, most of the time."

"That sort of thing should be fine," I said, frowning. "It's not a violation to help people, even if they're not good people, or even if that help is in service of the violence of war."

"Oh, I know the rules well enough for things like that," said Mr. Shoemaker. "The thing is, one day a woman came to her, all beat up. Not a solider. She was, ah, a comfort woman, most likely. And this woman, this prostitute, when she was alone with the nurse, the old woman in my care, she asked for aid, for salvation, or at least for it to be reported. There were a whole bunch of them, she said, other women, usually not beat up so bad, but still forced into ... into that kind of work."

"Ah," I said. I felt my blood run cold. "And ... what did she do?"

"Nothing," said Mr. Shoemaker with a sigh. "She thought about it, but she didn't think it would actually help anyone, to report it, not since it was the military that kept the women in the first place, or maybe just the military were patrons. She would lose her job at best, she thought, so even though it tore her up, she stayed silent."

"Oh," I said. "I ... I would need to speak with her about the specifics, but ... per the True Rules, there are only very narrow exceptions for refusing to do what you know is the right thing, and fear of personal repercussions is not one of them. If she had come to me, asking my advice as an afterlife lawyer, I would have advised her to speak fully and frankly about what she had seen." And then I would have hoped that the second-order hearsay exemption would protect me when it was my time to be judged. "But that's not actually what you're asking," I said. "You're asking whether or not you should kill her. I'm sorry, but I *have to* call the police."

"I understand," nodded Shoemaker. "Though you know, if I had someone like you, I wouldn't have to do so much guesswork about who was fit for reaping and who wasn't. And if you care about keeping people out of hell, as I figure out probably do, then you owe it to them to help me."

I didn't understand why he thought he had me in a philosophical trap. Didn't he understand what I'd just said about the necessity of fighting evil? Didn't he understand that he was going to hell for killing? I could see his logic, and I almost agreed with it, but an untrained man making judgment about people, hoping to take them out before their minds went and they did something the True Rules wouldn't forgive ... well, it was the horrifying sort of thing that almost made me believe that we should never have learned the True Rules in the first place.

"I'll need some time to think about it," I said, which was the truth; I never lied. "I'll schedule an appointment for tomorrow." That was the truth too, but he wouldn't be able to make the appointment. "I hope that I've helped offer you useful advice for your current predicament. We can talk more tomorrow. I will, naturally, waive the fee." All still true.

"That's all I ask," said Mr. Shoemaker with a nod. He shook my hand and left, and I stared at the closed door until the next appointment walked through.


End file.
